


a hundred years or more

by rufeepeach



Category: Maleficent (2014), Sleeping Beauty - All Media Types
Genre: AU, Angst, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-16
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-02-04 20:25:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1792093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I promise, no harm shall come to you whilst I live" - Maleficent never kisses Aurora, believing she has already done more harm than good, and instead resigns herself to watching over the sleeping princess for the rest of her days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a hundred years or more

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ambrosia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia/gifts).



It takes two hours for Maleficent to find Aurora’s chamber, and when she does she can hardly breathe.

Aurora is sleeping, and she will not awaken.

Maleficent knows this, knows it with a certainty that comes from the thrumming of magic in her veins, the same magic that binds her dearest friend in slumber now. She swore the curse would never be broken. She had put in the caveat only as a final slash of spite to the cruel man who called himself Aurora’s father. True Love’s Kiss does not exist, and how many times must Stefan create something beautiful for Maleficent to love, only to rip it away from her?

Whatever regrets she has, they are all overshadowed by how ardently and deeply she wishes she had simply slain him in his sleep when she had had the chance, before she’d ever considered cursed children and death-like slumbers.

But what good is vengeance now to Aurora, sleeping peacefully and eternally in her bed? Maleficent can think of a thousand ways to murder Stefan, but not a one of them would bring darling Aurora back to life. And in the face of that, what is the use of any of it?

“I promise,” she whispers, softly, the only promise she could ever make that would be worth the breath it takes to speak it, “No harm will come to you, for as long as I live.” Her voice almost cracks, almost, but she is proud when it does not, “And not a day shall pass, when I will not miss your smile.”

Faeries live a long time; some say forever, although that too is a lie. Maleficent knows will still draw breath long after Stefan has succumbed to the ravages of old age. Not a hair on Aurora’s head will be touched or harmed in all of that time, and she will never be alone; Maleficent will be dust before she allows a breath of hostile wind to touch the sleeping princess.

Diaval is watching. Maleficent can feel his eyes flick between the two of them, between Aurora’s sleeping face and her own tears, and for the first time she cares not at all what he sees of her fragile heart. This is her purpose now: let him know it, if he will.

“The faeries will be back soon, mistress,” Diaval says, softly, after perhaps five minutes or fifty years of dead silence. “You’ll need to be moving.”

“If I let them come near her, they may dye her very skin bright blue,” Maleficent replies, eyes still locked on Aurora’s face, unwilling or perhaps simply unable to move, “I shan’t allow their meddling to interfere a moment longer.”

“You can’t let them know you’re here,” Diaval argues, concern colouring his tone, although for whom or for what Maleficent can’t imagine.

“I can’t leave her, either,” she replies, softly. She waves a hand, forming the thought without speaking the words, and Diaval becomes a raven once more. He watches her, as if to ask how that will help. She raises an eyebrow, and waves her hand again, and this time – for the first time – Maleficent changes her own form. It is an effort, a disruption of nature, but if it is needed to keep Aurora safe then Maleficent cares not for the trouble. She pours herself into her new shape, and hopes dearly that it shall become easier with time.

When she is at last finished, a large, dark tabby cat with green eyes takes Maleficent’s place at the side of Aurora’s bed. Maleficent is somewhat comforted to find within moments that her tail is as good as her staff ever was for balance, and that ears are almost as comforting as horns. She will get used to this. She has to.

Diaval is still watching her; Maleficent is still fixed on Aurora. Nothing has changed, except now she has claws and fur instead of horns and skin.

No wings, though. The ache of having them now only to lose them once more when she resumes her own form would be unbearable. Maleficent has lost too much already this sombre night. She cannot live through the resumption and then renewed loss of flight as well.

Diaval clicks his beak at her; the words come loud and clear, although he has no lips now to speak them. “Won’t they still notice?”

“A small dark cat hidden in the shadows?” Maleficent scoffs, “They didn’t notice you for the last sixteen years feeding and protecting their charge, I highly doubt I will draw any attention.”

Diaval does not comment, thankfully, upon her choice. He’s always had better manners than almost any other creature Maleficent has known.

They watch a while longer, side-by-side on the sill by Aurora’s bed, until there’s a bang at the door and the faeries push it open, returning to once more cluck and bicker around the princess’ bed. They discuss the search for Aurora’s True Love, the places they must go and the things they must do to awaken her. Maleficent knows she should join their quest, should try even now to find someone to awaken Aurora. She cannot: there is no one out there who could.

They leave soon after; the night grows colder. Maleficent finds a dark corner of the room to curl into and settles into sleep, as Diaval sits on the sill and keeps watch.

( _I’ll never leave your side, beastie, and you’ll lie peaceful and safe for all of your days. It’s the only apology I can provide_ )

\---

After three weeks of scouting for another likely true love, the faeries have yet to return.

Maleficent curses them for their lack of vigilance, their careless attitude to the safety of their charge. Aurora is vulnerable in sleep, even more so than she had been in glittering, unselfish life, and for all they know she lies alone in her bed, unwatched and unguarded.

Diaval comes and goes: he patrols the grounds and farther afield, scouting for news as he had long ago. He brings Maleficent small rodents and the occasional fish to eat; she does not leave the room to hunt for herself.

She slips frequently between her forms, from cat to faerie and back again, but she only eats when she wears her fur. It’s easier that way for Diaval to find her food.

But most of the time she just watches, and waits for the faeries to return from their futile quest.

Maleficent cursed Aurora with an impossible curse, with a caveat phrased and cast in spite. She’d wanted the father to suffer, and so she had worked through the daughter. And now she pays the price for that selfishness, that blind hatred, while he raves and screams in his iron tower, unaware of the truth of the pain she has wrought with this dreadful curse.

Stefan never knew his daughter: he will not care now to know she is gone. It was Maleficent who watched her grow, who ensured she was fed and clothed and safe, even from the shadows, even without credit or approbation. Maleficent was more Aurora’s parent these past sixteen years than Stefan ever was, and so it is she who must stand at the bedside and weep, who must confine herself to these cold stone walls, and grieve the loss.

The irony is not lost on Maleficent, although it brings her little humour and even less comfort now.

( _They didn’t deserve your childhood, beastie, none of them. You were owed so much better than anyone deigned to give you, although you’d never have asked for it, never have known it yourself. You were the best of all of us. We didn’t deserve you)_  
\---

It takes two months for Diaval to ask the question Maleficent knows he’s been holding back.

They’re in their man-like forms once more, watching the princess as always they do. Diaval has fetched books from the castle library, slim volumes carried in his beak, and Maleficent is slowly working her way through them, sat on the end of Aurora’s bed like a child’s nurse. Sometimes she reads aloud, when she can, although she knows that Aurora cannot hear her. Maleficent’s knowledge of human words is fleeting at best but Stefan had taught her letters in her youth. She exploits that knowledge now to pillage his castle’s library without his knowledge, and she’s clever: she’s learning.

It brings her a little, hollow joy to know that he waits for her even now, even while she sleeps and eats and breathes within the tower of his own palace without his knowledge. He waits to kill her, and she means for him to expire of age and his own filthy madness before he knows she was ever there.

She’s reading in the sunlight, sat at the foot of the bed with her feet by Aurora’s shoulders, when a question she knows has been coming a while is at last addressed.

“Why… why have you never changed before now?” Diaval asks, haltingly. He’s leaned against the windowsill, cleaning his nails for he finds it easier than pecking at his talons, and Maleficent looks up from her book with an arched eyebrow, considering how best to answer his question.

“You mean from this form into a cat?” she asks, for clarification, and Diaval nods. “Is that your question? Or do you mean to ask why you’re needed if I could become a raven myself at any moment?”

“Both,” he admits. “You’ve been mourning your wings since I’ve known you, mistress: it seems somewhat pointless now.”

She’s tempted to throw something at him, to throw him from the tower without his own wings for that slice of insolence. But of course she doesn’t, because asking impertinent questions and being utterly unafraid of her is a large part of why she’s kept him at her side for so long.

“I can’t grow them back, in this form,” she answers, at last. “You always resemble yourself, in whatever form you’re placed into. As a horse you had a beak. As a wolf you were black as night, and shimmering like feathers. In no form would my wings be real, and to change at all would feel like denying my true body, denying the loss it was forced to endure.”

“So why now?” he asks, as if the answer is not obvious, as if he needs her to say it aloud. Maybe she needs it too. “Why change now?”

“Some things are more important than the wounds of the past, however deep they run,” she murmurs, and her eyes settle once more on Aurora’s peaceful, sleeping face.

He nods, understanding, as she knows he must, and returns to cleaning his nails.

( _I could be a mealy worm the rest of my days, beastie, and I’d still have never made up for half of what I did to you_ )

\---

A year goes by, and King. A Stefan grows worse by the day.

He rants and raves every day and night. He does not come to Aurora’s room, but even from across the castle Maleficent can hear his screaming. It’s music to her ears, even after so much regret, even after having worked hard to put her anger to one side after what it did to Aurora. She screamed like that and worse, when she awoke on that riverbank and found what he had done to her. Let it drive him mad, she thinks, let him rot in his festering misery and die of it.

There is no heir: the Queen is dead, and Stefan had no other children. Aurora would be Queen, were she present, but no one would crown a girl who will never open her eyes again.

Diaval tells of a choosing, of lords and nobles from across the lands coming to curry favour with the mad king, to gain the throne upon his death. He does not meet them. He spends his days in a locked room, they say, ranting to himself, shouting at spirits.

Maleficent has to wonder if her death would have pacified him. She has no intention of setting herself alight to keep him from freezing, but it is an interesting question. It would give Stefan too much credit, of course, to think that guilt for the truly unforgivable crime that gave him his throne is what gnaws at him, what makes him rave into the small hours.

“Your father is a madman, beastie,” she murmurs to Aurora, some days. “I cannot understand how an angel such as you came from a monster such as he.”

Stefan comes to Aurora’s room at last on her seventeenth birthday. Diaval has spent the night weaving flowers into the girl’s hair as a tribute, a gift, for they are the only ones who see her now. Maleficent slept the night in her feline form, curled into Aurora’s side. A year after Aurora’s curse caught up with her, and her father at last deigns to visit.

Maleficent does not resume her true form upon his intrusion, but she hisses, her whole body tensing and her claws sharp, when he enters the room.

He tries to kick her aside, mutters something about vermin. She bites his shin, and it bleeds.

Stefan barely appears to notice. He stands as if carved from marble by Aurora’s bedside, and stares at her, blank and all but unseeing, with an emotion Maleficent does not recognise on his face. Would she know love, if she saw it from him? Would she know regret, sorrow, grief? All Maleficent knows of Stefan is fear, pretence, and blinding rage. It takes all she has not to rise in a riot of shivering green flame and strike him down where he stands for even daring to look upon Aurora.

Diaval sits on the windowsill, and Maleficent watches with bared teeth as he leans over his daughter at last, and kisses her forehead. “I’m sorry, darling,” he murmurs, “I’m sorry I couldn’t kill her for you. I’m sorry I let that monster do this to you.”

Maleficent wonders what Aurora would say to that, if she awoke now to those words. They’d parted in such anger, but Maleficent cannot imagine the sweetest child alive glorying in a friend’s murder, no matter what their history. Aurora is not her father, nor her assumed godmother: she would never harm another, not even in the depths of anger, hatred, or soul-crushing agony. She would rise from troubles burnished and softened and made even sweeter, even more kind. She would recoil from the unwashed scent of her insane father, from the bitter clatter of his voice and the crashing of his footsteps.

But Maleficent cannot reveal herself, and so she must allow him to touch Aurora, to comment how sweet of the maids who never come to weave flowers into her hair, and how the scent reminds him of long ago.

They are feathersweet, the beautiful and glowing white flowers of the Moors, and Diaval flew day and night to gather them.

Stefan tries to take one from the coils of Aurora’s golden hair; Diaval shrieks and snaps in pure anger, flapping his feathers and shrieking. Stefan jumps, his hand snatched back, as Diaval launches himself from the windowsill and beats the king with his strong wings.

“Blasted bird!” Stefan curses, as he retreats to the doorway. Diaval leaves him there, and does not stray beyond the threshold. This is not an attack on an enemy: this is the defence of a loved one.

“Maleficent will be back for her,” Stefan mutters to himself, his hand fisting in his own matted, shaggy hair, “she’ll come for me, I must be ready.”

He leaves as if he has forgotten why he came. Maleficent thinks for the hundredth time that week that it would have been better for everyone if she had simply spirited the child away in the night and left a changeling for Stefan to find, as her kin had done in the days of old.

She blurs into her true form once it is clear Stefan will not return. She waves a hand to allow Diaval to do the same, and they’re silent for a long time, uncharacteristically so. Maleficent can feel Diaval’s glare from across the room. “Is something the matter?” she asks, at last, when it appears he will not explain himself on his own.

“You let him touch her,” he snarls, quietly, as angry as he has ever sounded when directed at Maleficent.

“So did you, Diaval,” Maleficent retorts, tiredly. Her hands have strayed to Aurora’s hair, and straighten the flower Stefan had mussed before Diaval beat him off. “And he’s gone now. Back to his delusions.”

“We should take her away,” Diaval says, angered where Maleficent is simply weary, deep in her bones. “Away from him.”

“And have him burn the Moors in search of her?” Maleficent laughs, bitterly. “No, she will be safest in plain sight: she always would have been.”

“I couldn’t stand to see him anywhere near her,” Diaval returns to the windowsill, his usual spot, and is eyes are stormy as they watch over the sleeping girl together, the girl they both love. “It made my blood boil. I wanted to murder him for coming near her; birds don’t do that.”

“You’re no more a bird than I am a cat,” Maleficent tells him, softly. “But if this task bothers you so much, Diaval, then feel free to leave. I release you of your duty.”

Diaval simply stares at her like she’s lost her mind, his mouth gaping and utterly lost for words. Then, surprisingly, he lets out a small laugh of disbelief and shakes his head. “And here birds are supposed to be the stupid ones,” he mutters, and says no more about it.

He’s still there in the morning, when Maleficent has curled herself into Aurora’s lap to sleep the night, and blinks open her cat’s eyes to see the raven still perched on the windowsill, watching over them both. He’s always there, every morning and evening, and almost every hour in between. Maleficent does not question it again.

( _I cannot be sorry he didn’t get raise you, beastie, to know you, to be loved by you; he deserves your smiles and laughter even less than I do_ )

\---

King Stefan is dead before Aurora turns eighteen.

The kingdom pretends to mourn, but in truth everyone can feel how the air has lightened, become easier to breathe, and even the power vacuum of a throne without a monarch is nothing compared to the appalling cruelty Stefan had been guilty of.

The funeral is three days after his death. Maleficent leaves Diaval to watch Aurora for the first time in over a year to go and see for herself that Stefan’s truly dead.

He lies still and cold in his coffin. She jumps silently onto one of the tables placed beside him, meant for tributes and flowers and the like, and stares down into the weathered, haggard face of the man who so utterly ruined her life.

Perhaps ruined is too strong a word, gives too much credit to his effect upon her. Changed is better, maybe, or shaped. But there’s a good ring to ruin, a power and emphasis that goes well with other words – betrayal, devastation, mutilation. Maleficent has never hated anyone or anything more than she does the man who now lies dead and cold in his casket, and it is sickening how deeply she wishes that she could have murdered him herself. A relatively quick death of natural causes seems entirely too simple for the man who ripped her wings from her back, and tore her very soul to tatters.

He’s dead. He’s dead and she didn’t kill him. And Aurora still sleeps, and Maleficent still can’t feel her own heartbeat in her chest. Stefan is dead, and Maleficent cannot feel a thing, not grief nor joy, at his passing. She’s as empty as ever she was, and that alone brings tears to her eyes, for all that cats do not cry and this body is not built for it.

She returns to the doorway and gathers herself. Then, and only then, she slips herself back into the form these people will recognise, and laughs through blood red lips. “Well, well,” she murmurs, but her soft voice still carries. The room turns silent. All eyes are fixed on her. “A royal funeral, how wonderful.”

“What do you want, Maleficent?” one of the faeries, the pink one, Knotgrass, flies up in front of the congregation. Maleficent can remember the days when she was the Moors treasured protector, and these faeries, small and silly and all but powerless, had relied upon her for safety and fawned at her feet. How quickly loyalties change.

“Why nothing,” Maleficent gives a malicious chuckle, the mirror image of the one that had echoed through the throne room on the day of Aurora’s christening. It’s just as falsely cruel and merry as its predecessor, and just as well formed to cast Maleficent as the bad faery: the villain of the piece. It’s easier this way, for no one will expect her to be kind, to care for their squabbling little problems, to give her very heart when she no longer possesses it. Ruling with fear is far less effort than diplomacy or tact. “I simply wished to gaze once more upon the King, before he is laid to his rest.”

“You’ll go no further!” Knotgrass cries, as if she has any say in the matter. Maleficent casts her aside, along with her sisters, and they crash into the shield of a guard with a quiet clatter.

“Oh, I think I will,” Maleficent smirks, “I shall go wherever I please.”

“Maleficent,” an elderly man with a crown on his head and a mantle about his shoulders steps forward with a placating expression. “Please. You’ve already taken the princess. Leave the King to his rest.”

“Why?” she snaps, her full gaze turned on the man, and he trembles but holds his ground. “He did not leave me to mine.”

The man stares at her without fear. He is perhaps her height but too elderly to pose any threat at all, and in any case he holds no anger in his eyes. He does not seek to command, only to beseech, to beg for clemency for a man already dead and soon to be buried. What folly, what foolishness. “King Stefan’s reign has ended, your Majesty,” the man says, respectfully, and that impresses Maleficent, just a little. “Let the animosity die with him.”

“Who are you, who commands me?” she asks, with more curiosity and less anger than she intended in her voice.

“King Kinloch, of Westerhill,” he gives a short bow, one monarch to another, “And I do not command, merely advise. The Moors are not served by another slight against its neighbour, be the king alive or dead.”

“And this land is not served by continually attacking mine,” she replies, coldly.

“Then pay your respects to King Stefan, and send a message to whomever comes next that you’re willing to let the feud be buried with him. There can be peace, your Majesty, if you’ll only let it happen.”

Maleficent stares at him, but he does not flinch. She presses a finger to her lips, eyes wide with faux innocence and confusion, the very parody of a little woman incapable of decision. She wishes to curse King Kinloch, for forcing her to be civil in front of a room of people she wishes to terrify. She wishes to curse Stefan to an eternity in whatever hell she can dream of, or to disfigure his corpse the way he disfigured her own living body so very long ago. She wishes a lot of things, most of them brutal and unforgivable, but the last unforgivable thing she did caused the most beautiful and precious light in the world to be snuffed out forever, and she will not make that mistake twice.

“Very well,” Maleficent says, at last, and steps back. She raises her arms wide, and calls out in a ringing voice, “Let the reign of the mad King Stefan be an example to you all!” she cries, “That any who attempt to subdue the Moors shall be vanquished, their lives accursed and their deaths celebrated. Let whomever shall rise to take his place learn this lesson well, for I will not teach it so lightly again!”

The fires of magic around her are golden this time, not sickly green, and Maleficent cannot imagine what that means.

She vanishes from the hall in a reeking cloud of black smoke, and reappears in Aurora’s chamber a moment later, her chest tight and throat clogged. Aurora would hold her hand, would comfort her, would promise that tomorrow is always brighter and offer to keep holding her hand, keep smiling and making the world bright, until that promise came to pass.

But Aurora is in a sleep like death and will never awaken, and Maleficent is the one who put her there.

And so when Maleficent slides down the wall, her head on her knees, and cries in earnest for the first time since she lost her wings, no one is there to comfort her, or to begin this life anew. She is alone as she has always been, and as she always will be. She is alone, and no one sheds a tear for that. They hate her more even than they hated Stefan, and what a pair they make, the mad, dead King and the evil faery whose soul he destroyed.

Maybe she is evil. Maleficent can’t tell anymore, but then faeries very rarely deal in right and wrong, good and evil. The humans could have their ridiculous dichotomies. There is only one abiding truth in Maleficent’s life: loss.

Diaval blurs into a man without her even thinking about it, and looks rather startled to tell the truth. He had been watching her, hovering as only a bird could, while she cried, but as a raven he could do little to be of use, and she hadn’t felt his presence. Now tentative arms come around her, and he’s never so much as touched her in his man form, they’re always so very careful about that, but now she cannot bring herself to care.

She’d hated Stefan with a fire that was almost holy, but before that she’d loved him too, and she will never be able to equate that trembling, sweet boy she’d loved so much with the cruel man he had become. It is that boy, the boy who threw away his iron ring just to touch her hand again, for whom Maleficent cries, and in that moment she is young herself once more, and she can almost feel her wings pressing against her back.

Diaval does not pull her close, does nothing but rest with one arm about her shoulders, and it is Maleficent’s choice to curl in a little closer, to place her head on his shoulder as her sobbing ceases and she is quiet and still once more.

“He was a sweet boy, once,” she whispers, and Diaval does not reply, so she continues. “He told me stories about his farm, and smiled at me, and we were happy.”

“King Stefan?” Diaval asks, and Maleficent nods.

“Just Stefan. He returned to me an adult, and his heart was sour and cold with ambition. But my boy was sweet, and he’s been dead for over twenty years.”

“I’m sorry,” Diaval murmurs, “I’m so sorry, mistress.”

And for once, Maleficent does not brush off the sympathy or cut him off with a cruel comment or a flick of her fingers, to turn him back into a wordless bird. Instead, she nods her thanks, and allows herself this one, long day to be weak in the face of the death of the enemy who was once her dearest friend.

They neither of them comment on it later, when she is once more feline and he has brought her dinner, but Diaval knows she moved in closer to him, and Maleficent knows that he has somehow worked out how to shapeshift for himself. Neither of them mentions anything at all, and the world spins on with one less tyrant in it.

( _I’m sorry, beastie. I’m so sorry. You’re an orphan now, but I promise you’ll never be alone. I promise. I’m so sorry_ )

\---

It takes five years longer for the country to find itself a new King, and when it does he has a familiar face.

Stefan was an orphan with no siblings, but the Queen had a sister and that sister has a daughter, Adele. She’s just enough royal blood in her to sit upon the throne, and then she marries a prince of a neighbouring land, and the legacy is at last secured. In all honesty, the regency of the prime minister was more than tolerable, but Lord Caldwell is an elderly man now and has no ambition to wear a crown, nor any heirs to succeed him. Five years is long enough to foster a new beginning. Maleficent only hopes that whomever comes next will maintain the peaceful solitude that keeps Aurora safe.

The day before the soon-to-be king and queen are to be married, there is a knock on the door and a vaguely familiar head looks around into the room. He’s older now, taller, broader, but still as handsome as the day Maleficent watched him fail to awaken Aurora. Her heart stirs with pity for just a moment; he has not lost half of what she has, but he has still lost something.

Maleficent, on instinct, slips back into her usual form. She has long since abandoned her black robes: her clothing is still dark, her hair and horns still bound, but looser and without the heavy collar, for what is the point when only Diaval will see her?

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Prince Philip stammers, “I didn’t realise the princess had an attendant.”

“Someone has to keep watch,” Maleficent says, stiffly, angry to her bones with the little faeries and the court both who abandoned Aurora so lightly, who would leave her alone up here, all alone, without anyone to hold her hand, as if she’s truly dead. Maleficent will never leave her alone, even if Aurora’s eyes never again open, and she has little more than pure disgust for anyone who knew her and feels otherwise. For what is the use of professed love when it is so selfish and so fleeting?

“I’m glad,” Philip admits. “I… I was worried she was all alone.”

Maleficent feels some credit is owed for that. She inclines her head, “Everyone assumes she is.”

“I’m glad she isn’t,” Philip repeats, and Maleficent wonders how much he remembers, if he recognises her from their brief meeting in the woods. “I only came to pay my respects. If she were awake… well, I would likely be marrying her tomorrow.”

“You are the new King?” Maleficent asks, surprised, “Why, you’re only a child!”

“I’m twenty-five, mistress,” Philip objects, with a puffed up breast that Diaval would have been proud of.

“Twenty-five,” Maleficent murmurs, somehow still surprised by the passing of the years. She has taken, since Stefan’s death, sometimes to leaving Diaval with Aurora and slipping from the castle, wandering the grounds in her feline form, even straying once or twice into the woods. More often, she just wanders the castle, the corridors that lie still and empty, the rooms that are dusty from disuse in these days without a King.

Aurora is twenty-three, now. She should have a child or two, a throne, a husband by her side and love in her heart. Instead she has a bed from which she will never rise, and darkness behind her eyelids. Her children, her husband, her whole shining life have been taken from her, and Maleficent cannot bring herself to distrust Philip, the boy who could have been all of that for Aurora had she only been spared her curse.

“Come inside, your Highness,” Maleficent stands aside, and Philip is the first soul in six years to enter Aurora’s room and look upon her sleeping face.

“She looks the same,” Philip says, softly. His hand strokes the side of Aurora’s face, very softly, as if to assure himself that she is real. “She hasn’t aged a day.”

Maleficent has been in this room every day for the past seven years; she supposes she wouldn’t have noticed. But now, yes, now she sees it: Philip has grown considerably. He has a man’s broadness of shoulder, a man’s stubble, a scar on his jaw and thicker, shorter hair. He is a man now, and suddenly he looks far too old for Aurora, trapped forever at sixteen.

The curse prevents her from ageing. She will lie there forever, for eternity, young and beautiful, and she will outlive even Maleficent.

Maleficent gives a choked, stunned little laugh, half a sob. “No, no she hasn’t. She’s as lovely as ever she was.”

“As are you,” Philip adds, his eyes clearer and harder, sharper, than they’d been at love-struck eighteen. He watches her carefully, and she makes no move to step backwards or to hide her horns. If he tells anyone that the fearsome, evil faery has been spying on the sleeping princess then they will never find a trace of her, so why hide from the man who will be King; the man who would have been Aurora’s husband? “I do remember you, you know, from the forest. And I saw you that day at King Stefan’s funeral. You spoke with my father; I watched you negotiate a compromise.”

“Your father is King Kinloch,” Maleficent remembers the old man who prevented her from cursing Stefan to the seventh circle of hell at his funeral. A good man: kind and clever. Philip must take after him. “Then you know who I am.”

“I do, Maleficent,” Philip nods, but smiles, a disarming and easy smile, reassuring, “but don’t worry, I won’t tell.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re the only one here, watching over Aurora,” Philip shrugs. “You wouldn’t do that if you meant her harm.”

“Your father...” Maleficent hadn’t missed the past tense, and is surprised to find herself saddened by the idea of the old king’s death. Kings have never meant anything to Maleficent, but he was a good man, and there aren’t enough of those in the world.

“He passed away six months ago,” Philip tells her, heavily.

“I’m sorry,” Maleficent says, and means it.

“Thank you,” Philip inclines his head with a small smile of gratitude and means that too, and Maleficent can find no dislike in her at all, no bitterness or envy, for this sunny young man who might have made Aurora so happy. “In any case, you’re rather distinctive. I’d have known you from that one glimpse in the forest.”

“I thought you might be able to wake her,” Maleficent sighs. “But true love’s kiss does not exist.”

“I knew her only moments,” Philip says, gently. “I imagine you love her far more than I could have, for all she is still the most beautiful maiden I have ever seen in all my days.”

“I love her more than anyone could ever imagine,” Maleficent tells him, her hand curling softly in Aurora’s hair, stroking her smooth, pale brow. “And she will never know it. Silly little beastie.”

“I’m sure she knew it,” Philip tells her, a kind lie.

Maleficent does not reply, but her hand strokes Aurora’s temple once more, and returns to her side. “Will you leave her be?” she asks Philip then, “Here, safe in this room? Will you let her sleep on in safety?”

“This is her home,” Philip says, gently. “More than it ever will be mine. I haven’t the authority to remove her even if I wished to. Yes, she will be safe here. And undisturbed, if that is your wish?”

Maleficent nods her thanks, “It is.”

Philip inclines his head, and makes for the door. He stops with his hand on the frame, and looks back halfway, “But I might visit, if that would be alright?”

“Aurora would want that,” Maleficent says, after a long pause. “Be well, your Highness.”

“Good day,” he leaves without another word; the door shutting behind him is a relief for all that his visit was almost a pleasant surprise.

“He loves her,” Diaval says from behind her. Maleficent doesn’t turn.

“He could have,” she agrees. “If given time.”

“Maybe he’ll be able to break it, someday,” Diaval suggests. Maleficent hasn’t the heart to take the hope away from him, although it is still impossible. Love exists: true love’s kiss does not.

Maleficent blurs into a cat without answering, and hops up onto the bed to curl into Aurora’s side. Sleeping is far more peaceful than being awake, in any case, and there’s less temptation to talk to Aurora when she’s in cat form. When she’s herself, Maleficent often wants to talk aloud to her princess, but the pain of knowing there will be no words in response, no laughter and no smile, stills her tongue more often than not.

Philip does return after that, perhaps once or twice a month, for a few minutes here or there. He asks after Maleficent’s health, he has human food sent from the kitchens, and sometimes brings some thread and cloth for sewing, understanding as he does that she must pass the time somehow.

He takes to calling her Mistress Mal, and she allows it: it’s a better name than Maleficent in any case, for a woman who is no more now than a caretaker.

“We could do worse, for a King,” Diaval says, after one such meeting, a year into Philip’s reign.

“Indeed we could,” Maleficent agrees. “Far worse.”

( _He’d have made you a fine husband, beastie. I’m sorry that he never will_ )

\---

On Aurora’s twenty-sixth birthday, Philip comes to visit once again. Diaval watches his approach carefully, perched on the back of Maleficent’s chair, and Maleficent reaches up to stroke his feathers idly, comfortingly. Diaval likes Philip, but Aurora’s birthdays are always difficult for him, and this one is no exception.

It has been ten years since she was cursed, and she still looks like a young girl who fell asleep in her clothes after a long and happy day. Philip smiles at the feathersweet in her hair, “Who weaves the flowers in her hair?” he asks, curiously. “I never see you leave this room, Mistress Mal.”

“My friend comes, sometimes,” Maleficent says, her hand still in Diaval’s feathers, “he brings the flowers.”

Philip smiles, warmly, “He does excellent work.”

Diaval preens, and Maleficent looks up at him fondly. “He’ll be happy to hear that, I’m sure.”

Philip takes a seat beside Maleficent in the twin armchairs that have appeared recently by the fireplace. He has set to work quietly making this a room Maleficent can actually live in, with a fire burning in the grate, rugs on the floor to keep the heat in and soft chairs and cushions to replace the hard stone floors. Maleficent is so grateful for his kindness that she can’t even put voice to it. He is the only person outside of these walls who pays Aurora any respect at all, and the whole castle has changed since he rose to the throne. Stefan’s era of madness and cruelty, of greed, is all but forgotten, eight years after his death. The air itself seems lighter, cleaner to breathe.

Philip brings out a bottle of wine from his tunic, “Thirsty?”

Maleficent bristles, she can feel herself stiffen and tense all over, ready to rip his throat out. This warm, fire-lit bedchamber could not be further from a moonlit riverbank in the Moors, but once more a man is offering her a drink with a kind smile, and Maleficent cannot relax, cannot smile.

“No,” she snaps, “I don’t drink.”

Philip looks bemused, but his overwhelmingly good nature takes hold, and he inclines his head, “Alright, then. But I will, if you don’t mind? A toast to our princess.”

Maleficent cannot speak: she just nods her assent, and watches as Philip raises his glass, and murmurs, “May you awaken to a better world than you left, Aurora,” before taking a long drink, and setting down his glass.

“She won’t awaken,” Maleficent sighs, and shakes her head slowly. “Ever. The curse will last until the end of time.”

“You may have given up hope, Mistress,” Philip says, easily, “but I haven’t. You’ll see her again. All curses can be broken.”

“You’re a kind child,” Maleficent murmurs, and Philip smiles.

“I am a child, and she is a beastie,” he grins, and Maleficent stares at him, startled, but cannot keep a small smile from her lips. She will never be a mother, but that isn’t to say she doesn’t have children. “What are you, mistress?”

“I am a faerie,” she sighs, because the horns more than give it away, and Philip is a friend. She even plans to truly bless his child, when it comes – Adele should give birth any day now, and whatever comes out will be blessed with immunity to magic upon his or her christening. That is the best gift Maleficent can think to bestow, after all. “Without wings, in a world where I do not belong.”

“You’re Aurora’s faery godmother,” Philip corrects, and Diaval, perched on the back of Maleficent’s chair, snaps his beak. She is quiet for a long time, pensive, before she answers.

“Perhaps, I was” she allows. “Once.”

He keeps drinking, and she goes back to her sewing.

( _I’d have blessed your children, your little beasties, and perhaps they too would have grabbed my horns the way you did when you were small. Neither of us will ever get to meet them now. I stole those from you too beastie, and I’ll never be able to make up for it_ )

\---

The child is born happy and healthy, a girl, and three years later a brother follows. Maleficent blesses them both with happy, magic-free lives, and never leaves the tower.

“You could go the christening now, you know,” Diaval reminds her, as she finishes her work on the christening gown for Philip’s third child. Sixteen years since Aurora’s cursing, and there’s the slightest hint of grey in Diaval’s hair, where neither Aurora nor Maleficent have aged a day. Magic has touched him enough to extend his life somewhat, but not indefinitely. He’s ageing, and they both try very hard never to mention it.

“No,” she says, shortly.

“Maleficent-“ he starts, and stops, unsure how that sentence ends. He stopped with the ‘mistress’ title somewhere around Philip’s first daughter’s birth, and Maleficent can’t say she mourns the loss of the old formality. She hasn’t commanded him in a very long time; she hasn’t made a plan or executed an order in even longer. They take care of one another, and of Aurora, and what is the use of hierarchy or formality in that?

“The kingdom is better believing me vanquished, back to the Moors,” Maleficent tells him. “I cannot be a presence there and watch over Aurora at the same time. Can you imagine the outcry against Philip, if they knew he’d let me stay here all these years?”

“You’re just scared,” Diaval says, and puts his hand on her arm. They still touch so infrequently, but they’ve been all each other has for the past thirty-two years, and the old walls are slowly crumbling down. Sometimes, in the night, he will become man-shaped again and find her on the bed, and they will curl together around Aurora and not say a word when they wake up that way in the morning. Decades and loss will make lines blurry and indistinct; familiarity and loneliness make everything difficult, too difficult to talk about, and yet somehow as easy as breathing.

“Perhaps,” she allows.

“Philip knows you wouldn’t hurt a hair on his child’s head. You’re even making the girl’s gown! Surely sixteen years is enough time-“

“It’s never enough time,” Maleficent corrects him, sharply. “Sixteen years is nothing. It’s a breath on the wind. It’s never enough time.”

And Diaval, who loves Aurora too, who misses the child he all but raised as much as Maleficent does and who’d die to see her smile just once more, concedes the point. “You’re right. But you still can’t spend eternity locked in this room, away from the world.”

“The world never did me any good,” Maleficent says, but it’s a lie and he knows it. She enjoys roaming on cat’s paws through the kingdom, wandering and exploring, even walking in her true shape every now and then, in the woods where people cannot see her. But paws and feet are not wings, and so whatever freedom Maleficent might once have treasured, the sun on her skin and the wind in her hair and feathers, the power of her wings holding her high above the clouds, has been gone far longer than she’s lived in this tower room.

She hasn’t returned to the Moors, not once. Her lands are safe with Philip on the throne and so no longer require a protector, and they never needed a Queen. The world is better off with her locked in this tower, and Maleficent is better off without knowing that she poisons the very ground she walks on.

Aurora alone needs her. Maleficent made her a promise, sixteen years ago, and this one she plans to keep. No harm will come to her. Not ever.

“Philip will want you there,” Diaval says, softly. Maleficent nods.

“I know, Diaval. But I don’t want to be there. It would… stir up unfortunate memories. I can bless the child just as well from up here. It’s better this way.”

Diaval nods and gives in, not wishing to push any harder. Maleficent is grateful for that, for the intrinsic and implicit sense he always has of her boundaries and how hard he is allowed to push them, how far she can bend before she fears breaking.

Maleficent freed him from his duty a long time ago, but he is still here. He’ll never leave for good, no matter what happens between them, and that fact makes everything seem just a little bit less terrible. They both stay for love of Aurora, and that alone means the world, but Maleficent is glad of Diaval for his own sake as well.

She wonders if he knows that; she’s certain that he does.

“What is he calling the princess?” Diaval asks, after a few minutes of silence. Maleficent doesn’t look up from her sewing.

“Aurora,” Maleficent says, softly. “He’s calling her Aurora. Rory, for short.”

Diaval is stood by their princess’ bedside, and his calloused hand touches Aurora’s crown softly, like a benediction, like a prayer. He still weaves feathersweet into her hair on her birthday, every birthday. They still read her stories, sing her songs, talk to her as if she can hear them. The world beyond these walls behaves as if Aurora died almost two decades ago, as if she were never born in fact, but in this room she is alive and they continue to treat her as such. The moment Maleficent gives up and thinks of Aurora as truly gone is the moment when she too will crumble to ashes.

“And so you cannot go,” Diaval says, voice heavy with understanding.

“And so it would be a mockery for me to breathe their air, on this day.”

“A celebration for a baby,” Diaval says, and Maleficent catches his eye with a little laugh.

“How wonderful,” she drawls, a mockery of her old tones, and he laughs with her.

That night, Maleficent at last reaches around to the back of her head, and starts to unwrap her hair and her horns. Diaval slips into his human form and joins in to help her, and by midnight the waxy, heavy cloth is in a large black puddle on the floor and Maleficent’s hair is tumbling down her back once more, free and unbound as a waterfall.

She doesn’t go to the christening but Diaval goes in her stead, and King Philip nods in his direction when a small golden swirl dances over little Princess Rory, the same blessing Maleficent has sent all of his children: a long and happy life, and immunity from magic.

( _I’m sorry that your christening saw me at my worst, beastie. My horns should have been unbound, my blessing sweet. I should have murdered your father and stolen you away in the night. I shouldn’t have laid a finger on your head in anger, and now we’re both paying the price_ )

\---

Philip brings his youngest daughter to meet her namesake often. His elder children, Briar Rose and Kinloch, come too, on occasion, but Maleficent has a soft spot for Philip’s youngest. More often than not Rory begs to hear the story of the cursed princess, and Maleficent finds it’s not too difficult to tell the story with some embellishments, to describe in detail how wonderful Aurora’s smile was, how beautiful her laughter, and how wicked and wrong-headed the faery who cursed her.

She always ends the story with the princess having sweet dreams forever, and hopes dearly that she is right, that Aurora’s dreams are sweet and warm, full of the love and wonder that the waking world so often denied her. Maleficent has no way of knowing how well Aurora sleeps, whether she dreams or not, and so this is no more than a kind lie told to a sweet child and a desperate adult alike, and she does all she can to believe it as she says it aloud, over and over.

Sometimes she is too tired or lost in her sadness, and Diaval tells other stories, about the faeries when Aurora was young, about growing up as a crow, about the mysterious protector of the Moors who disappeared. Rory soaks those up just as readily, and Diaval becomes one of her favourite people very quickly, although only when Philip is not in the room. Diaval has never felt right about revealing himself to Philip, and Maleficent can understand that: she herself might feel strange about an unknown man lingering in Aurora’s bedchamber, although she knows Diaval is every bit as dedicated to Aurora as she is.

When she’s five years old, Rory asks Maleficent how she knows the story. She tells her that she was a wicked faery once, but that she was very very sorry, and would never do it again. Rory hugs her, and holds onto one of her horns, and Diaval is the only person who sees a tear slide down her cheek.

( _You would adore this child, beastie. You would teach her to climb trees and throw mud and roll down hillsides to land in the softest grass. All I can do is tell her stories, and know that her smile will never be as lovely as yours_ )

\---

It takes twenty-one years for Diaval to propose something terrible. “She’s going to wake up in a world of strangers, you know. You could… I don’t know, send all of them to sleep, so she’ll know the world she wakes up to.”

Maleficent had been washing her fur beside Aurora on the bed. She blurs back into her usual form, and looks at him hard. There’s the odd streak of grey in her own hair now, but muted, and it means little. Diaval looks perhaps fifty in human years, but as a bird he’s the same as ever he was. Time has touched them all, although Aurora sleeps on, eternally sixteen and beautiful as the sun.

“She barely knew anyone as it was,” Maleficent says, as if it doesn’t matter, because truly it doesn’t. Aurora will never wake up. She will be here until someone comes to kill her – over Maleficent’s dead, cold body – or until the castle crumbles around her. Until then, she will be sixteen, beautiful, and eternally trapped in sleep. Maleficent should know: she designed the curse, after all. “And she won’t wake up.”

“How do you know that?” Diaval cries, “Come on, Maleficent! Someone must be able to do it!”

“No power on this Earth, Diaval,” Maleficent reminds him, tiredly, because they’ve been having this argument for two decades now although the words are only just now being spoken. Diaval wants to try to wake Aurora; Maleficent can know a lost cause when she sees one, and especially when she’s caused it.

“Except for true love’s kiss!” he says, and Maleficent sighs.

“There is no such thing! Philip wasn’t it, and there’s no one else. It doesn’t exist anyway. Love exists, but true love is a lie, and expressing it in a kiss is folly.”

“How can you be so sure?” he snaps. “Are you really this cold? Are you this willing to let her die alone?”

Maleficent is on her feet in moments, and has her hand against Diaval’s throat, his back to the wall. She uses no magic to hold him there, and he doesn’t move: she hasn’t shown this much emotion in months, years, and they both know it.

She is slowly turning to stone; she can’t find it in herself to object.

“I will live forever if I have to, to protect her!” she cries, “A hundred years or more, it doesn’t matter to me!”

“But you won’t try to break the curse?” Diaval objects, “Come on, Maleficent, there has to be a way!”

Maleficent releases him, and steps back, willing to obliterate a wall in her pain, her fury. Pain and anger are all that she knows, truly, and she can wield them well. But the evidence of that power rests on the bed behind them, and she won’t cause that kind of harm again, she can’t: it’d kill her before anyone else.

“Her father invented it,” she tells him, softly, a story she’s never told anyone. “We knew one another as children. On my sixteenth birthday he wanted to kiss me… he told me it was true love’s kiss. That it was powerful and special. I used that to taunt him when I cursed her: her father invented it to take advantage of a lovesick fool, and it doesn’t exist.”

“There has to be some way to break it, come on!” Diaval is all but begging, and Maleficent wonders if he doesn’t regret his decision to stay here with them, to tie himself to this life of solitude and gradual, endless loss. She wouldn’t blame him, not for a moment, if he did.

“And you don’t think I’ve tried?” she demands, “You honestly believe I haven’t spent hours trying to change it, to revoke it, every day for the past twenty years? I have done all that I can, Diaval, and still she sleeps. She will always sleep. And my punishment is to never see her awaken again.”

“You’ll let her rot here forever to punish yourself?” Diaval is staring at her, and for the first time Maleficent feels once again like the villain she has always been, deep down inside: for the first time he sees the entropy and rot that have taken their toll on her soul.

“I have done all I can, Diaval,” she says, simply. “I said it two decades ago, and I will say it again now: you’re more than welcome to leave me here, and never return.”

Diaval stares at her a moment longer, and then with a little shrug he blurs and becomes a raven, and soars out of the tower window.

Maleficent watches him go with a long, low sigh. She hasn’t any tears left to mourn yet another loss, no matter how deeply this one cuts, no matter how great the loss may be.

( _He’ll be back for you, beastie, even if he’s long since tired of me. He loves you more than life itself, and he wouldn’t abandon you: he’s loved you since you were very, very small. And even if he doesn’t, I never will. I can promise that if nothing else_ )

\---

Diaval returns six months later with a dead rat in his mouth and the feathers of his right wing mauled.

“Well, well,” Maleficent murmurs, a smile blooming across her face as she looks up from her reading. Philip’s son is sat beside her, seven years old and engrossed in the cat’s cradle Maleficent helped him to wind about his chubby little fingers. The children visit more and more and call her Auntie Mal, and kiss Aurora’s cheek as they leave. Aurora deserves all the love in the world. Even if she can’t feel it, Maleficent would never dream of denying her a moment of the reverence that is only her due.

Philip has creases around his eyes when he smiles that same broad, bright smile he’s always had, and there’s a little grey at his temples now too. He’s ageing well, if Maleficent is any judge, and his children are sweet things. Briar Rose is eleven and becoming a great beauty, with long chestnut hair and bright green eyes.

Her smile is pretty, it’s true, but it has none of the purity of Aurora’s beaming sunshine. But then again, Maleficent might well be biased.

Diaval gives her a look, a sarcastic and unimpressed look that makes the last six months of abandonment and loneliness melt like new snow. Maleficent has hardly been neglected these past months, but he’s back and she can’t help but be relieved. He looks like he’s been through the wars. She closes her book.

“Kinloch, could you possibly fetch me a bowl of warm water?” Maleficent asks the boy at her side, “There should be a servant a few floors down to help you. Do not tell them what it’s for.”

Kinloch nods, seriously, and toddles away on his little legs out of the door. The servants don’t know she’s here, of course, but even if they come all they’ll see is a raven with a broken wing and a cat washing herself by the fire, and Aurora of course, lying as still as she has for the past twenty-two years. Kinloch is a good boy, in any case: he knows his papa would be cross if he exposed their secret now.

Her good humour fades when he shifts into his human form, and she sees the state of his arm. It’s broken, definitely, and bleeding: he’s been attacked, and his handsome face is a mask of pain. Maleficent wants to murder whatever did this to him. No one lays a hand on her raven.

“Who did this to you?” she gasps, as she reaches his side. He lets her take his arm in her tender hands, and she examines the deep gashes, the twisted bones. She can fix it, she thinks to her own great relief, but it’ll hurt.

“Got on the wrong side of a wolf,” Diaval winces. “I told you I hate dogs.”

“Yes,” Maleficent says, nodding, her voice cracking and afew tears rolling down her face, “Yes you did.”

Kinloch comes back to find Maleficent pressed against Diaval’s shoulder, her face buried in his neck, his good arm wrapped around her. She takes the bowl and sends the boy back to his parents, and begins to clean Diaval’s wounds, slowly and carefully, with patient and tender care and a sarcastic comment for every two of his growls of pain. For every comment he makes about her terrible bedside manner she comments that he smells like wet feathers, and that the rat he brought in will start to smell soon.

He looks her dead in the eye, “It’s an apology, you idiot,” he says, as if it should be obvious, “I didn’t want to come back empty-handed.”

She’s oddly touched by that. She presses a kiss to his temple before she even thinks what she’s doing; they stare at each other in shock for a long moment.

“Thank you,” she says, at last, returning her gaze to his wounded arm. “That was very thoughtful.”

“Least I could do,” he shrugs, awkwardly. “I was an idiot. I’m sorry.”

Maleficent smiles, and inclines her head in agreement, and they continue on in silence. She hasn’t eaten as a cat in a decade, not since Philip started having food sent up here, but that evening – when his arm is technically healed and he’s resting by the fire – she melts into her cat form and eats the rat as if it is the finest delicacy imaginable. He watches through eyes pretending to be closed; she pretends to think he’s asleep, and jumps from the floor into his lap, curling there as sometimes she does at Aurora’s side.

His hand rubs the back of her head and strokes the soft fur down her back, and she purrs and curls in closer. The world isn’t right without Diaval here; she hadn’t realised what she had until it was gone.

( _Somehow the pair of you became my family, if ever I could have one. My raven and my beastie. He misses you too, even with you right here beside us. I told you he would come back for you_ )

\---

When young Briar Rose turns sixteen it has been twenty-five years since the last princess’s sixteenth birthday celebration. Philip refuses to take no for an answer.

“You will come to the party, Mal!” he commands, his tone brooking no argument.

“Will I?” she laughs, amused and somewhat startled by his surety. “And I shall be what, your horned aunt? They will know me on sight, Philip, and rightfully will assume that your daughter will fall victim to another foul curse with me nearby, and no one will be comfortable. Allow them to believe me vanquished, your Majesty. I am quite happy up here, away from it all.”

Philip raises an eyebrow, and gently takes her by her shoulders. “Come along, now. It’s been twenty-five years, and you made your peace here long ago. Come into the party on my arm; Adele will accompany Rose. Show the world how much has changed.”

“And what am I to tell them, when they ask of the Moors?” she asks, softly. “That I have not returned in a quarter of a century? That I have lived in secret in this tower all of these years?” she shakes her head, “I am sorry, Philip. Give Briar Rose my love, and tell her that her gift is waiting beneath her bed. I will remain with my princess, and allow you to dance with yours.”

“Mal-“

“I’m sorry,” she steps back, away from him, and returns to Aurora’s bedside without another word. Diaval snaps his beak, and Maleficent does not turn around when Philip calls her a stubborn old thing and marches from the room.

“It’d be too much of a terrible irony to watch her dance with princes, and wear her crown,” Maleficent mutters. Diaval bows his small, dark head. They’re of one mind, one heart, in this moment: that party should have been Aurora’s, twenty-five years ago, and they should have all danced with her in the Moors and been merry. Instead she is asleep, eternally asleep, and another girl receives her gifts, her status, the love and honours due to her. The daughter of her would-be husband; the world is a cruel, cruel place sometimes.

Maleficent does not go to the party, and Diaval does not fly down to watch and report back. Instead Diaval combs Aurora’s hair until it glistens, and Maleficent reads her a story, and then another, and another, until the pages blur from tiredness or tears or both, and she is lying beside her princess, drifting into sleep, with Diaval beside her, leg to leg and side to side.

She awakens at midnight with Diaval’s arm around her, and she does not move. Were he any other man she would recoil in fear and pain, she would run far away and never look back, but he is her truest friend in all the world, and all she has had for such a very long time. This isn’t love, she thinks, not as she’s ever known it, but it is fondness and happenstance and all of it rather sweet, in its way.

Aurora, as always, sleeps peacefully on. Maleficent wonders what she’d think of this, if she awoke at last to find her godmother and her pretty bird curled together like twins or lovers at her side, forever awaiting her return.

( _You would have looked beautiful in that silk-spun gown, beastie, with a coronet around your smooth brow. You could have been a Queen for all the kingdoms, and your smile would have set the world alight with peace and joy_ )

\---

After Briar Rose’s birthday comes her engagement and her marriage, and then Kinloch’s first battle and victory, and then little Rory’s first dance and first kiss. Ten years pass in the blink of an eye, and soon Philip is in his fifties, and Briar Rose has children of her own, and Aurora is still, eternally, sixteen.

Diaval’s hair is greyer still, now, and he looks Philip’s age. Maleficent feels no different than she did a lifetime ago, but there are little cosmetic changes she notices, a few wrinkles here and there, a grey hair or two. She both hopes and fears that she is truly eternal, immortal: that she will live as long as she must to keep Aurora safe. Perhaps she will. But Diaval won’t.

“I could make you young again,” Maleficent tells him, softly, one morning in May.

“Oh?” he looks up at her from his cleaning of his fingernails, and she eyes him carefully. “And what good would that do?”

“You would fly faster, as you used to, hunt better.” She wants to add that he could remain with her longer, forever, but that’s a selfish thought, for she’d grant that boon to no one else – indeed, she could not, it is only because he has lived so long in two forms that the magic might work.

In her darkest moments, Maleficent wonders if the only escape offered from this long, hard life is the finality of death. If so, she would not take that chance away from him.

“She’ll wake up any day now,” he says, gently. “And then your worrying will be for nothing.”

Maleficent smiles, because his eternal optimism is charming now where once it was irritating, futile. Aurora deserves someone to keep believing, to keep hoping for her, even when the reality is crushing and all hope must now be truly lost. Philip has grandchildren of his own, now, and Maleficent hasn’t left the castle grounds in twenty years, and Stefan is cold in his grave. Who could come now, in this twilight hour, to awaken Aurora?

“Fine, fine,” Diaval says, “I’ll make you a deal. If the curse hasn’t broken in ten year’s time, you can do whatever magic you want to make me young again. If it has, we age gracefully together while Aurora laughs at us. Deal?”

“I won’t age, Diaval,” she reminds him, gently. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“You can do anything you want, my dear,” he tells her, gently. “In the last fifty years I’ve at least learned that.”

She laughs, then, “How about this? If she wakes up, I turn you young so we can enjoy our princess’ return. If she hasn’t after ten years, I do it anyway.”

“You really hate my grey hairs that much?” he asks, smoothing his hair in a mockery of the kind of self-conscious vanity neither one of them has felt in decades around the another.

She laughs, then, because she cannot put voice to her real thought: that the idea of watching him grow older, die like Philip must and like Stefan did and all without her, while Aurora sleeps on in eternal youth, breaks what’s left of her heart.

“Do we have a deal?” she asks. He purses his lips.

“Maybe,” he allows. “Let me think on it.”

( _I can’t watch you alone, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I haven’t stood alone for such a very long time, and I need him to carry this fire with me, or it’ll burn me alive and you’ll be all alone, beastie. I’m so sorry; I can’t do this alone_ )

\---

Diaval at last allows Maleficent to breathe a little life into him, although only enough to keep him in stasis. Philip will not allow her to do the same for him, and she doesn’t offer twice.

Forty-two years after Aurora fell into her slumber, Philip lies dying in his bed, and his grown son readies himself to sit upon the throne. Kinloch is a good boy, bright and strong like his father, and he will be a good king. Maleficent knows, at least, that he will leave them alone, and keep the fires stoked and the food on their little table. Philip was wise to keep them friendly, to make the situation known to his heir.

Philip is dying, and Maleficent can’t stand to watch, although this time, this one time, she knows that she must.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t wake her,” he tells her, as he coughs, a hacking and wheezing thing. Maleficent, feline once more for the sake of those standing by, curls against his side and purrs her discontent. His shaking, gnarled hand rubs her back. She wishes she could save him; she knows that she can’t.

“The iron tower,” he murmurs, softly. “We never touched it because King Stefan’s will forbade us, but there’s something up there. You should go and look.”

She watches him carefully, unnatural hope blooming in her heart although it is impossible, after all this time, for Stefan to have hidden what she thinks might be lost up there. “My parting gift, Mistress Mal,” Philip murmurs, “take whatever you can, burn the rest. Tear the thing down. Kinloch will help.”

She purrs her thanks, and wishes there weren’t nurses and guards standing watch, wishes she could tell him from her own mouth what a gift he was, what a balm to her soul, what a light in their torn kingdom. Philip should have been Aurora’s husband, king of both lands, but then again there can be no better death to be had than this. He has grandchildren clamouring at the door, three grown children of his own to nurse him and miss him when he’s gone. She couldn’t have asked for a better life for him, even though the world is emptier and all their lives with it with Aurora trapped in her slumber. She certainly couldn’t have wished him a kinder death.

She rubs her head against his chin, and hopes he understands that she’s so very fond of him, that she will miss him too, that he alone has restored much of her faith in mankind. Aurora is her daughter in all the ways that matter, and in a sense she feels that Philip is her son. She watched him grow, from a hapless boy chasing a girl in the woods, to a strong and loyal prince, to a wise and respected monarch, and now he is dying an old man in his bed, and she cannot save him from time.

She jumps down after one last purr, one last nudge, and pads away, leaves him to his family. She has to wonder, as she returns to Aurora’s chamber, if life would be better if Aurora too had aged; if they now watched over an old woman with hacking breath, ready for her grave.

But Aurora is still beautiful, still sixteen, even as the boy she had loved once dies of old age downstairs, and Maleficent does not change back but instead crawls into Aurora’s lap, and waits for Diaval to tell her that the king is dead, and his son will be crowned in the morning.

When he does, she finally resumes her old form, and sobs her soul out on the side of the bed, her face buried in her hands. Diaval takes the seat beside her and wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her gently into the warmth of his body. He presses a kiss to the top of her head as she rests against him; she does not comment, and does not recoil, doesn’t even think about either, because they’re all each other has and it’s an odd love, unexpressed and tacit but real, that they share.

It’s such a profound echo of the last time a king died, of the moment she had cried for the death of Stefan, her enemy, for all that she had rejoiced in his demised; now it is a friend who has passed away, and she rejoices only in the fact that he had died fulfilled, happy, and loved.

( _He’d have made you the best husband, beastie, and that too I stole from you. Maybe Diaval is right: maybe someday you’ll awaken, and someone else will be as good to you as my dear friend Philip would have been. I’m sorry that my hope died a long time ago. I’m sorry you’ll never grow old with the man you love_ )

\---

King Kinloch orders the iron tower at last be destroyed, forty-five years after its master died, and in the wreckage something odd is found: a pair of large, dark wings bolted to a glass case, and still fluttering and beating in the sunlight.

Maleficent is leaning against the windowsill when she feels it, a burst of light against her back, golden and sealing, healing, and suddenly, at last, finally, her wings are on her back, back where they belong. It’s over within seconds, a mere inhale and exhale and the deed is done, and all in all it’s an oddly anticlimactic moment for such an important event. Diaval is left gaping at her.

“They’re heavier than I remember,” Maleficent murmurs, but her face is bright, her joy overwhelming, tears in her throat and rolling down her cheeks. “They’re heavy… they’re back.”

“All this time,” Diaval murmurs, and his hand creeps out to reverently stroke her feathers, for they are magnificent and ordinary both in the streaming morning sunlight. It has been almost seventy years since she last wore wings, and the sensation is as odd as it is familiar, as perfect as it is peculiar.

“They’re back,” she sighs, with satisfaction, and the very, very last of her loathing for Stefan vanishes on the wind in that breath, for he has been dead for such long time now, and he kept these wings alive for her no matter how trapped they might have been, as she has done in an odd way for his daughter. Weight and counterweight; balance and reciprocity.

It takes three more days for her to leap from the window and soar through the clouds once more, and her first thought is that she’d have liked to carry Aurora here, to show her the sun and the sky from high above the ground below.

She returns to the window and steps down, and takes her usual seat by the fire. The wings don’t fit, and that makes it at last feel real. Her wings don’t fit in this closed, dark, warm little life in the tower.

Maleficent is whole again, but her heart still lies dormant with Aurora, and the return of her wings is tainted by the knowledge that she still will never be free. For as long as Aurora sleeps, Maleficent will not leave her side.

She settles in to sew, Diaval watches, his feathers gleaming onyx, and shifts into a man again.

“You could leave now,” he murmurs, “no harm will come to Aurora without you here. You could return to the Moors.”

“She is trapped, and therefore so am I,” Maleficent tells him for the hundredth time. “These wings make no difference.”

“One day we’ll soar above the sky together, and chase eagles and clouds,” Diaval tells her, “I’d like to see that day.”

Maleficent smiles, and waves a hand. The change takes him immediately, years of her own life sacrificed without a second thought to augment his. Diaval is young again within moments, and smiling like he always has, the smile she knew so long ago and will love until the day they are all dust.

“We’ll fly together someday,” she promises, as his forehead knocks hers, “That I promise you.”

( _Perhaps you will prove me wrong once again, beastie, and someday awaken and see these wings of mine. They’re russet like autumn leaves and soft as feathersweet, and they could carry us both without a thought. Maybe one day you’ll see the clouds from up above. If my wings can come back to me, then someday perhaps so shall you_ )

\---

Kinloch has grandchildren of his own, by Aurora’s hundredth birthday.

The tower is now more Maleficent’s home than anywhere else ever could have been, and she wonders if she’ll ever wish to leave it, ever miss the Moors again. Some days she flies, some days she resumes her feline shape, for the habit of a lifetime is hard to break. Diaval still looks as he always has, still looks at her the way he always has, with so much loyalty and affection it could break through any wall she threw in his way. Maleficent is thankful he did not choose to grow old and die without her, for that may well have killed her.

She and Diaval braid the feathersweet into Aurora’s hair, as they have a hundred times before, and Maleficent leans down with a soft smile, and murmurs softly to the sleeping beauty.

“I’m still here, beastie,” she murmurs, “I’m still alive for you. I still miss your smile.”

On impulse, she leans down and presses a kiss to Aurora’s forehead, a luxury and penitence she has never allowed herself before now. She never kissed Aurora because it felt like a mockery, to have cursed her to be awoken with a kiss when she cannot do it herself. She never did it, and now she wonders why.

Aurora’s eyes flutter open. “Hello, godmother,” she beams, her smile bright enough to light the sun. Maleficent jumps back, startled and overwhelmed because she’s had this dream before, because it’s never real. But Diaval is staring too, and there is still a crow outside cawing at the sun, and the ground is still firm beneath her feet.

“H-hello, beastie,” she murmurs, tremulously. Aurora’s grin widens further, and oh sweet gods above; Maleficent had managed to forget how Aurora’s smile would transform her whole face. She’d forgotten the clarity of her voice, and the sweetness of the light in her eyes. Eighty-four years does little to aid the memory, and everything is different and yet the same. Maleficent is frozen to the spot, unable to breathe or move, and Aurora is looking around, taking in the changes, Maleficent’s wings, everything with bright eyes.

She’s awake. Aurora is awake. Maleficent doesn’t know whether to cry or crow for joy, and she remains frozen in her indecision.

“True love’s kiss,” Diaval murmurs, and shakes his head, “why didn’t we try that before?”

“Diaval!” Aurora cries, overjoyed, and Diaval is at the bedside in a moment, gathering Aurora into his arms. He’s shaking, crying, and Aurora is beaming, and it has been minutes for her and decades for them, but none of it matters. They’re together again. Maleficent’s family is at last as it should be, and she’s crying, slowly, because she’s never been happier, not even the day her wings returned.

“Shall we return to the Moors now, godmother?” Aurora asks, and there’s no use telling her the details now, the true story of the last hundred years or more.

Maleficent just nods, stunned, “If that is what you wish.” Aurora nods and beams her assent, and so Maleficent leans down to gather Aurora into her arms and hold her close against her, the slight weight nothing to her faery-strong arms.

Diaval becomes a raven and flies behind them, and they soar over the kingdom, over the wall of thorns that never came down, and into the Moors and safety. Home.

( _Together_ )

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [you're the direction I follow](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1983207) by [bemusedlybespectacled (ardentintoxication)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ardentintoxication/pseuds/bemusedlybespectacled)




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